http://www.goneforawhile.ch

First things first: the roads on the Balkan are mostly in fairly good condition - as long as they are financed by the EU (signs are labelling this often)! Otherwise, holes the size of a football are not unusual, the sewing system is not all covered up, one hits unexpected sandy passages or the road is a dirtroad alltogether though it is a perfectly nice main road on the map. Once in Romania, a police officer stops us and directs us to a bigger main road as the one we are just about to take 'is kapputt'...

To us, it seemed that the driving is generally quite careful, the opposite of what most friends and other experts have told us in beforehand. Cars and trucks take good distance when they pass, the even yield sometimes when they wouldn't have to and every now and then, a construction worker or so hands out some grapes or the like when we pass. Many people wave, laugh or honk the horn friendly as they pass. But obviously, the mentioned friends and experts can not be so wrong either: Balkan roads are deadly, not doubt! They maybe not more deadly than other roads, but they show it better: if one or more people die in a crash, a cross or a gravestone is put up on that spot, with picture and dates of the unlucky. On the most impressive days, I am convinced that I counted way more than one cross per kilometer. For more than 100 kilometers straight!

Less respectful is the way run-over animals are treated: not at all that is. No one ever seems to remove a dead dog or cat from a road. Inevitably following vehicless will run that poor creature over too. Now one would think that this ends up in a big mess, but its not soo bad: for some reason, dead animals being run over in intervals with maybe a drying period in between seem to simply loose one of their originally three dimensions! Instead of ending up in a large, undefined spot, they are being compressed until they look like a picture of that dog in real live with all the dimension as the original. Very strange, but discovered many times!

In Bulgaria, especially around the recently grown beach resorts and overdeveloped tourist-towns, we notice all of a sudden more people besides the roads, even far out in the woods where nothing else is around. Soon we realise that all of these people are women, most of them in their best age but somehow dressed improperly when looking at the location. High heels instead of heavy farmers boots, micro skirts instead of a hunters camouflodge pants....ahaaa: prostitutes! Indeed, here this business seems to go down out in the green, somehow amusing despite all the tragedy that often stands behind this topic...

Dogs are of course a topic too. They can be very annoying and some of them are big! But we are well prepared and have pepper spray at hand (we recommend this to anyone doing something similar!). This shows to be really helpful, instead of chewing our ankles, the dogs slide their nose intensly through the grass after a hit, the interest in some crunchy cyclists legs is gone in a second! Nevertheless, it is uncomfortable to meet them, we try to avoid rather than to confront... Last but not least (and sadly expected), the amount of trash along these roads is amazing! Everyone just throws whatever is too much out of the car window. Strange and irritating, especially in beautiful sceneries. Why people are doing this in some parts of the world is one of the things that we will never understand...